


that time was lost, yet time continued onward

by bookoftheazuresky



Series: Hesperus [1]
Category: Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crystal Stasis, Finally, M/M, Sandalphon gets a hug, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 08:52:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14257359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookoftheazuresky/pseuds/bookoftheazuresky
Summary: Instead of getting sealed into Pandemonium by Lucifer, Sandalphon spends 2,000 years in stasis in pre-Astral ruins. This...changes things.





	that time was lost, yet time continued onward

**Author's Note:**

> Granblue has gotta be the only fandom where going back in time would probably make things worse (thanks Astrals). So what about going forward in time?
> 
> Title is from Final Fantasy XIII-2. All beta credit goes to meadowlarked.

Eustace’s ears twitched, and he paused, finger poised on his rifle’s trigger guard. He couldn’t hear anything but his own breathing, and after almost a minute with nothing, he dropped his weapon back to his shoulder. These ruins were giving him the creeps. It was almost enough to make him wish another agent had been assigned to help him. Almost.

He walked deeper, mentally mapping his route so he could find his way back up to where he’d docked. Strange lines of reflective materials traced the rough-hewn walls in geometric patterns, catching his light in their angles and casting it back. It gave the halls a strange aspect, more illuminated than they should be. Maybe that was why it was making him nervous.

Or maybe it was the places that the stone had crumbled away, leaving gaps filled by impenetrable darkness. The ruined tower that he was walking in right now was several miles tall, but the blackness in those gaps seemed to go on forever. Some animal part of Eustace’s brain insisted there was no reason why they _couldn’t_.

He eyed the gap in the path ahead. The strange metallic lines stretched across it, some snapped like harp strings under too much strain. A few steps back, and Eustace leaped across and passed through an archway in the same all-angles style.

A large, tiered room opened before him, and Eustace slung Flamek off his shoulder as he was greeted by the mechanical buzz of golems activating. A few minutes later, when the last of the golems shuddered into deactivation, the blue lines drawn across its frame fading and broken from the gunshots he’d used to finish it, Eustace looked around the room at last. The same lines—conduits, he identified now—were still imbedded in the walls and floor, but here some of them were still active, glowing electric violet and casting an eerie light. Their subtle flickers made the shadows seem almost alive, which was at least three times worse than just catching the reflections from his light.

Deliberately setting that aside, Eustace moved to the lowest tier at the middle of the room, kneeling and examining the node where the conduits came together. Half of it was cracked like glass, explaining the dead lines extending to the entrance. The other half’s glow was slightly unsteady, the origin point for the fluctuations in the other lines.

If it was still supplying—or being supplied—power, then there might still be artifacts active in the complex. Eustace picked up a piece of the cracked crystalline substance, tucked it into a sample pouch for analysis by Society specialists, and stood.

Of the three doors that the active conduits led into, only one was still passable. Eustace made his way through it after marking his mental map with a note of the other two doors. Despite the still-active power source, the ruins seemed even more dilapidated this far in, piles of stone and dark gaps even more common. As a counterpoint, the patterns made by the glowing traceries became even more complex, clustered so thickly that Eustace didn’t even need his light to see by. Though the violet luminescence was an unhealthy and eye-hurting source of illumination.

Eustace’s ears were prickling again. He flicked them, trying to get a read on what he was sensing. After a moment, he picked out a faint hum, just at the edge of his hearing range. Something _was_ still active down here.

He quickened his pace slightly, heading towards the source of the sound. After a few minutes, a room protected by a barrier in the same violet hue as the power conduits came into sight. He approached it cautiously.

It was demarcated by a complex pattern of the power grid. Eustace stopped well short of that and strained his eyes to look through it.

Metal shapes, boxy and angular, aged almost to unrecognizability, were up against the far wall of the room. It looked like they had once been supplied by the power source of the ruins, but no longer. Sheets of cracked crystal leaned up against the walls, quietly falling to dust. However, as far as Eustace could tell, the thin coating of powdered stone and rock fragments present everywhere else in the tower was missing from this room.

It was the most promising lead he’d seen since he’d entered the ruins, but Eustace wasn’t even tempted to stick his hand in the field. That way led to lost limbs and dead Society agents.

He looked more closely, seeking some kind of off-switch, and inhaled sharply. A dark shape his eyes had originally passed over as another pile of rock revealed itself to be a person’s form, lying limp facedown on the floor. A broadsword looked to be held in one of the figure’s outstretched hands.

Getting in there had just jumped up to the top of his priorities. Eustace couldn’t tell if the person was dead, but he needed to make sure. Eustace looked the hall and room over again, more sharply this time. His eye caught on what looked like the node-point he’d examined in the earlier room, this one uncracked and fully illuminated. It still had the same characteristic flicker as the earlier one, and was smaller and on the wall, so Eustace would bet this was a localized power regulator instead of a power source. It also meant that destroying it was less likely to short out the whole of the ruins.

Eustace leveled Flamek, aimed for it, and pulled the trigger. The bullet cratered the crystal with a crack and the conduits in the room gave a last buzz and died. Turning his light back on, Eustace prodded where the barrier used to be with the barrel of his gun. Finding nothing, he cautiously advanced into the room.

He kicked the blade away from the limp hand before kneeling down to check for a pulse. To his faint surprise, there was one: slow, but not erratic or shallow. Musing on how lucky it was he’d come along, the erune hauled the person onto their- his- back.

A darkly pretty human teenager with wavy hair came to light, apparently deeply unconscious. He was wearing black and gold armor in a style that Eustace vaguely recognized as ancient over a hooded robe that had been reduced to tatters below the thigh. A quick examination of his half-gloved hands revealed calloused fingertips consistent with a hand-and-a-half sword like the one on the floor.

Reminded, Eustace hooked the weapon closer and raised his brows as he unsheathed a few inches of the blade. A genuine Astral-era relic, from the perfectly even diamond-latticed tempering. It was quite a splendid weapon, well balanced, keen edged, and not overly adorned. Not any kind of weapon Eustace would expect a teenager, even an older one, to have. Unless—no, probably—it was a family heirloom, which would also explain the armor design.

Unexpectedly, the teenager stirred with a faint sound and a frown. Eustace hastily set aside the sword (no point getting stabbed if the teen woke up swinging) and stuck a hand under the dark head to prevent possible injury. He’d thought that his find was very well under, but apparently not.

Red eyes blinked open and then squinted against Eustace’s light, brows drawing down in a pained frown. Eustace tilted the light away hastily. “You all right?” Eustace asked as the teenager shrugged off his touch with the same frown.

The human rubbed at his forehead like it hurt. “Who…?”

Eustace said shortly, “I’m an agent. Want to tell me what you were doing down here alone?”

“Not really,” the teenager said. His accent was nothing that Eustace recognized, not even from rare encounters with people from other skydoms. It wasn’t even _related_ to any accent he’d ever heard. “Want to tell _me_ what you’re doing here alone?”

“No.”

“Well then,” the teenager said like it was pretty self-explanatory, which it was.

Eustace sighed—so much for that conversation—and got up to finally start investigating the rest of the room. The erune kept an eye on the teenager in case he decided that he wanted to get hostile now that he was more awake. It didn’t look like it.

The array panels in the metal cases crumbled when he opened them to the air, and Eustace bit back a curse. The crystal sheets were totally inert, just reflecting his light. Once he completed a full circuit of the room, he had to concede it was a complete bust.

The teenager had retrieved his sword and gotten somewhat unsteadily to his feet. He kept rubbing at the bridge of his nose like his head was hurting. Eustace addressed him now. “I’m going deeper in. You can either come with me or try to get out on your own. Up to you.”

“Sure, why not,” the teenager replied, presumably a confirmation that he would be going with Eustace. His armored boots clicked lightly on the metal and stone floor as he headed in Eustace’s wake.

“I didn’t see any skyships anywhere around the island,” Eustace commented as they struck out further into the ruined tower. He received silence, and a raised eyebrow when he glanced back to check the teen’s reaction. He sighed, and clarified, “Am I going to have to give you a ride?”

“Have to? No.” Informative.

“You could give me a name,” Eustace suggested.

“You haven’t introduced yourself either,” the kid pointed out. Very helpful.

Eustace sighed again, and crossed off further conversation from his mental list. It was something of a relief, even if it was annoying. He tensed as his ears caught the sound of grating stone, and arrays of blue light bloomed on the floor. Golems pulled themselves from the stone and metal with an oddly liquid screech.

“Stay behind me,” the erune ordered, aiming. He heard the kid unsheathe his blade, then started firing.

A dark blur in his peripheral vision revealed that the teenager had ignored him. Of course. “I said-“

The kid’s blade lashed out, and the golem he hit collapsed, spurting blue-glowing catalyst fluid. He slanted a sardonic look as Eustace and said, “What was that?”

“Never mind.” So the teenager making it here wasn’t a complete fluke. Beatrix and Embrasque would be hard pressed to do better. It just didn’t answer all of Eustace’s _other_ questions about him, questions that were growing more pressing as his motions became ever more elegant and deadly. The final kill count was not as firmly in Eustace’s favor as he would have liked.

The questions itched unmercifully at Eustace as they proceeded downwards. Despite being a decade or so Eustace’s junior, the teenager had no trouble with any of the jumps, the climbs, the further golems. He didn’t ask Eustace for any help, and even got ahead a few times to wait in sardonic silence for the Society agent to catch up.

Finally, they reached an immense space, larger even than the conduit room all those levels back and above. Given the dimensions of the tower from outside, it must have been carved into the living rock of the island itself. The same impenetrable darkness filled the bottomless divide between the edge where Eustace and his temporary companion were and the far side, beaten back by the violet-glowing power lines on both sides. Once bridges must have crossed the gap, but they had crumbled long ago.

Eustace clicked his tongue and played his light morbidly into the velvety darkness below. It seemed to eat the beam a few body-lengths down. Not the most reassuring effect.

“Heading back up, then?” the teenager queried.

“I don’t have the equipment to get across that, so yes.” He had some grapples and other climbing tools with him, but not the heavy gear that this would take. He’d have to retrieve it from his packs on the surface to get further. If he _wanted_ to get further; the most he’d gotten out of this trip was a kid who refused to answer questions—

Eustace’s brain finally clicked together all the pieces that had been bothering him at last, all the little cues that added up to ‘not what it looks like.’ This teenager, with his strange accent and archaic armor and sword, who had looked like he’d taken a brief nap, with no apparent way onto the island and no concern about getting off. This very beautiful, _very_ strong, frankly _inhumanly_ graceful, that wasn’t how even the best mortal fighters moved, _trapped here_ -

Flamek roared. The primal beast sidestepped, a quick skip across spacetime to avoid the blast.

“Careful, you might hurt someone,” the primal drawled, sounding neither surprised nor threatened. Eustace hastily reevaluated his estimate of the creature’s specs—he’d _never_ seen a primal teleport so casually before. He kept Flamek trained on the dark-armored chest.

“Just my luck, to have unsealed a primal beast in _pre-Astral_ ruins.” Well, he’d fix that mistake soon enough.

“And I’m very grateful. But I can see you’re going to be unreasonable about this, so I may as well leave.” Eustace shot, then shot again, but the primal threw up a shield to absorb the first blast and performed the same teleporting trick to avoid the second, landing gracefully across the bottomless divide, well outside of Flamek’s effective range against primals.

Eustace firmly told himself again that he didn’t have the equipment to get across, let alone while avoiding whatever combat abilities went with that insane teleportation. The primal seemed to gauge him for a moment longer, then disappeared into the upwards-leading tunnel on the opposite side.

Calling up his mental map of the complex, Eustace took off running. It would be the crowning indignity if his ride got hijacked along with this.

~

Sandalphon glided, his brown wings stretched to their full extent to ride the waves of the upper air current the Astrals had named Serpentarius. At least, he _thought_ it was Serpentarius—the wind patterns of the sky seemed as changed as the skyscape itself. The pattern of the islands was fundamentally different: some missing, some reduced to drifts of shattered stone barely sustained by the lifting power of the tetra-elements, and some changed beyond all recognition. 

How long had he spent trapped in that tower, stuck inside that stasis field? Centuries? It wasn’t as if he could _tell_ , his core was still in equilibrium, unharmed from being stuck in low-power mode for who knew how long. And his body, wings, even clothes, were high-density mana constructs, not real flesh or cloth or metal. They would have repaired themselves automatically as long as his core was functioning.

Sandalphon abruptly tucked his wings and dove, angling for the largest island near. He thought it was Sephira Island, but who knew if that was still true?

It was a long, cold drop, the wind ripping at his hair and tightly tucked wings. Sandalphon ignored the sensation until the mountains that cupped the central plains started interfering with the air currents, then snapped his wings open so fast it hurt. Several backwings let him come to a sloppy but serviceable landing, feet hitting the ground so hard it rattled through his whole body.

He stood up, breathing hard, and looked around.

It was empty. Grass grew up to the height of his knees, studded with red poppies. The wind hissed through it, the only sound that even his ears could pick out. About a mile distant, he could see a small lake, which looked startlingly deep even at this range. Turning his head, he could see that it wasn’t the only such feature—the whole plains were pocked with craters and gouges now filled with water, sheets of stone thrown up around the sites of titanic impacts. But all these signs were overgrown with grass and moss, the edges of the stones abraded to smoothness by years and years and _years_ of wind and rain.

Sandalphon pressed his hand to his mouth and forced himself to breathe. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do after that, but breathing was important.

After some indeterminate time, Sandalphon rubbed his face until he could feel it again, took _another_ deep breath, and reached out with his magical senses.

The immense energies that had carved up the island were dim and fading, barely ghosts after so long. The fabric of the elements woven together was even and balanced and familiar from his earliest days; the Elemental primarchs had clearly survived this long and were maintaining everything as they were supposed to. It no longer held the echoes of hot wrath, icy indifference, biting disdain, or rooted obstinacy—or of any of the lesser powers that had sung discordance to that melody in his recent memory. He supposed that meant that the Astrals had won after all.

But then why did that skydweller try to kill him with the realization that he was a primal? He’d been well-trained but not furtive, underfed, or even nervous when he’d realized what he was facing. Not a reaction that made sense if the Astrals had ground the skydwellers back down into submission once more. He’d thought at the time that explaining that he was a _traitor_ angel would be a waste of his breath, but he wished he’d picked up more information.

Teleport signature above jerked his head up, and Sandalphon cursed himself for being thoughtless. Without the screening of the whole sky at war, opening himself up had just lit off on the senses of any listening primals. And he was flat-footed on the ground with no cover, about the worst position an angel could be in for a fight—

And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because it was _Lucifer_. Sandalphon’s heart squeezed with maybe-relief, though surely he would have sensed it in the elemental balance if something had happened to the Supreme Primarch. Lucifer looked the same as ever, the same shining wings, the same black and gold armor, but…the look on his face wasn’t the same, not at all.

Lucifer looked like Sandalphon was a miracle, unlooked for and impossible.

The primarch landed with a flick of bright feathers, wings held stiff and unsure. His blue eyes were full of a kind of pained hope.

“Sandalphon,” Lucifer said, almost a question, half-reaching out.

“Lucifer?” The elder angel had spoken to him many times. He’d always been…kind. Warm, as much as the self-contained Lucifer thought appropriate. But Sandalphon had always told himself that was just Lucifer’s nature, offered freely to everyone, that Sandalphon wasn’t _special_. No matter what he wanted to be. Still, compared to that, this was shockingly emotional.

Lucifer’s boots cut hissing through the grass in swift steps. Sandalphon had a second to brace himself for an attack before Lucifer caught him up in an embrace. Luminous wings wrapped around Sandalphon’s body like Lucifer was never going to let him go. Sandalphon was cocooned safely away from the world in Lucifer’s arms. He smelled of white flowers and sweetness and pure air, his breath warm against Sandalphon’s ear.

“I thought you were dead,” Lucifer said huskily. “It’s been so long. You just disappeared, I was sure- “He drew a shaking breath against Sandalphon’s hair. “I thought you were dead,” he repeated finally, voice trembling. Sandalphon could feel a faint tremor in the taller frame, kept at bay only by how tightly Lucifer held him. Wetness marked his fingers when he tentatively raised them to Lucifer’s face.

Lucifer had grieved for him. The tears he shed were for Sandalphon alone. The way he held Sandalphon like something precious, something that could be lost if he let go for so much as an instant, surely…surely that was…

Tears started reflexively in Sandalphon’s eyes and he hid his face in Lucifer’s black-clad shoulder. His sudden sob made Lucifer tense. “Are you hurt?” Lucifer asked, voice full of concern and rough with his own tears. He made as if to pull away, but Sandalphon found his hands gripping tightly to Lucifer’s strong shoulders. “Sandalphon-“

“I’m fine,” Sandalphon managed, full of too many emotions to name, “I’m fine, so please…please stay.”

“Of course. Of course I will.”


End file.
